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Related papers: A Method on Searching Better Activation Functions

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Activation functions have been shown to affect the performance of deep neural networks significantly. While the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the dominant choice in practice, the optimal activation function for deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 John Chidiac , Danielle Azar

The ReLU activation function (AF) has been extensively applied in deep neural networks, in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), for image classification despite its unresolved dying ReLU problem, which poses challenges to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-11-05 L. Parisi , D. Neagu , R. Ma , F. Campean

Deep learning training training algorithms are a huge success in recent years in many fields including speech, text,image video etc. Deeper and deeper layers are proposed with huge success with resnet structures having around 152 layers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Chinmay Rane , Kanishka Tyagi , Michael Manry

Activation functions are non-linearities in neural networks that allow them to learn complex mapping between inputs and outputs. Typical choices for activation functions are ReLU, Tanh, Sigmoid etc., where the choice generally depends on…

We study neural networks with trainable low-degree rational activation functions and show that they are more expressive and parameter-efficient than modern piecewise-linear and smooth activations such as ELU, LeakyReLU, LogSigmoid, PReLU,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Maosen Tang , Alex Townsend

Deep learning researchers have a keen interest in proposing two new novel activation functions which can boost network performance. A good choice of activation function can have significant consequences in improving network performance. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

A pivotal aspect in the design of neural networks lies in selecting activation functions, crucial for introducing nonlinear structures that capture intricate input-output patterns. While the effectiveness of adaptive or trainable activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Farhad Pourkamali-Anaraki , Tahamina Nasrin , Robert E. Jensen , Amy M. Peterson , Christopher J. Hansen

We prove existence of global minima in the loss landscape for the approximation of continuous target functions using shallow feedforward artificial neural networks with ReLU activation. This property is one of the fundamental artifacts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Steffen Dereich , Sebastian Kassing

In recent years novel activation functions have been proposed to improve the performance of neural networks, and they show superior performance compared to the ReLU counterpart. However, there are environments, where the availability of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-29 Ákos Utasi

Neural networks have shown tremendous growth in recent years to solve numerous problems. Various types of neural networks have been introduced to deal with different types of problems. However, the main goal of any neural network is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Shiv Ram Dubey , Satish Kumar Singh , Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri

We consider neural networks with rational activation functions. The choice of the nonlinear activation function in deep learning architectures is crucial and heavily impacts the performance of a neural network. We establish optimal bounds…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nicolas Boullé , Yuji Nakatsukasa , Alex Townsend

The nonlinearity of activation functions used in deep learning models are crucial for the success of predictive models. There are several commonly used simple nonlinear functions, including Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) and Leaky-ReLU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Nalinda Kulathunga , Nishath Rajiv Ranasinghe , Daniel Vrinceanu , Zackary Kinsman , Lei Huang , Yunjiao Wang

The widely used ReLU is favored for its hardware efficiency, {as the implementation at inference is a one bit sign case,} yet suffers from issues such as the ``dying ReLU'' problem, where during training, neurons fail to activate and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Moshe Kimhi , Idan Kashani , Avi Mendelson , Chaim Baskin

The success of deep networks has been attributed in part to their expressivity: per parameter, deep networks can approximate a richer class of functions than shallow networks. In ReLU networks, the number of activation patterns is one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Boris Hanin , David Rolnick

Activation functions play a pivotal role in determining the training dynamics and neural network performance. The widely adopted activation function ReLU despite being simple and effective has few disadvantages including the Dying ReLU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Sayan Nag , Mayukh Bhattacharyya

We propose the Hyperbolic Tangent Exponential Linear Unit (TeLU), a neural network hidden activation function defined as TeLU(x)=xtanh(exp(x)). TeLU's design is grounded in the core principles of key activation functions, achieving strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Alfredo Fernandez , Ankur Mali

Adversarial training is an effective method to improve the machine learning (ML) model robustness. Most existing studies typically consider the Rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function and centralized training environments. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Long Dang , Thushari Hapuarachchi , Kaiqi Xiong , Jing Lin

Activation functions shape the outputs of artificial neurons and, therefore, are integral parts of neural networks in general and deep learning in particular. Some activation functions, such as logistic and relu, have been used for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Johannes Lederer

In this paper, we introduce the Hyperbolic Tangent Exponential Linear Unit (TeLU), a novel neural network activation function, represented as $f(x) = x{\cdot}tanh(e^x)$. TeLU is designed to overcome the limitations of conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Alfredo Fernandez , Ankur Mali

LayerNorm is a critical component in modern large language models (LLMs) for stabilizing training and ensuring smooth optimization. However, it introduces significant challenges in mechanistic interpretability, outlier feature suppression,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Nandan Kumar Jha , Brandon Reagen